signed & dated recto;
signed, titled & dated “April ’62” verso
Provenance: Former collection of Hugh McMillan, Calgary, by descent to the family. Mr. McMillan was a prominent architect and philanthropist. His notable projects in Calgary included the Calgary Centennial Planetarium, the Calgary Herald Building and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. This work was originally acquired through the Business Art Service, Women’s Committee, of the Calgary Allied Arts Centre (label verso).
References: “Ritual II” (alternately titled “Birth Ritual”), 1963 oil on canvas; Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. See pp. 29-30 “Marion Nicoll: Silence and Alchemy” (Davis & Herbert; 2013) and p. 31 “Marion Nicoll Art and Influences” (Jackson/Glenbow Museum; 1986).
Jackson writes of Nicoll’s focus during this time: “The concepts of essential form, the primordial and the archetypal became extremely important to Marion later in the 60s when she wholeheartedly committed herself to abstraction.” (p. 17)
Of her years following New York, and works of this theme and imagery, he observes: “Increasingly her work during the period became centred around landscape and seasonal phenomena….The figure, which had so occupied her while she was in New York, virtually disappeared from her major canvases. There are a few examples, Ritual II, 1962, Pregnant Woman, 1933, but they are very different from her work from the model. They are concerned with the common events shared in virtually all women’s lives, the rites of passage, rather than events in a particular woman’s life. (p. 26)
